


The Bicycle Thief

by NotQuiteHydePark, Razi



Category: New Mutants (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Cute, Day At The Beach, Kissing, Multi, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 09:35:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19989955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotQuiteHydePark/pseuds/NotQuiteHydePark, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Razi/pseuds/Razi
Summary: Who ruined Rogue's day at the beach?





	The Bicycle Thief

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Glowbug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glowbug/gifts).



> Takes place after X-Men Gold 30 and before the events of New Mutants: Dead Souls.

The places you love stay with you forever, whether you grew up there, or lived there for years, or whether you had a few hours there in the sun with your friends, in your teens, before Loki kidnapped you all to the Nine Realms. 

That last example isn’t random, Xi’an knows. It’s why Berto bought, with cash, the strip of land called Class of ’64 Island—not so much an island as a mile-long path with a beach at either end— and made it his invitation-only mostly-mutants retreat. Guests can see Fire Island, and Rhode Island, and the south fork of Long Island, if they look steadily west or north, or the raw Atlantic to the south.

Look at the island itself, and you see sunlight and surf and beach umbrellas and younger mutants splashing each other and Shogo with Nga building sandcastles and Bobby freezing them solid when he’s here. (He’s visiting Fire Island today.) There are no grocery stores or drugstores or any stores at all here, though there’s a long bike path that connects all the houses, and a paved, wider path for wheelchair access, and a perfectly good Internet connection. Supplies come in from the mainland via Jean-Paul or whatever other flyer happens to show up for the weekend. And when there’s no flyer, there’s probably a vertical take off and landing super-vehicle, like the Fantasticar, which is landing on a square of beach grass right now.

“Hi, Kittycat!” “Hi, Franklin Richards!” Kitty shouts. After their adventure in Latveria, she always uses the boy’s full name, as a sign of the bond they have. But Kitty isn’t a teenager any more, while this version of Franklin hasn’t aged at all. “Isn’t he a bit young for our time?” Kitty shouts, her black-and-yellow beach coverup billowing in the wind. She’s talking to Susan Storm Richards, the only other member of the Fantastic Four in the Fantasticar.

“We’ve traveled forward in time a bit,” Sue says. “Stephen Strange told us to come here if we wanted to give our young person a day at the beach.” She pauses. “Remember when the entirety of Ocean City, Maryland was briefly replaced by cotton candy and corn dogs? or when every wheeled vehicle in Rehoboth Beach disappeared?” 

Kitty nods; Sue explains. Stephen Strange made Reed and Sue promise superhero-only vacations for Franklin after that, and gave them time-displacement tools to do it. There are powerful telepaths on Class of ’64 Island who will know if things get out of hand. (One of them is Quentin. Does time-displaced Sue know about him?)

Franklin is out of the Fantasticar now. And Franklin is running, not to his Kittycat, but to the taller blond woman behind her. “Takemewithyou takemewithyou takemewithou” Franklin says. “I wanna see my new friend and she lives in Chicago!”

“Franklin, sweetie?” Kitty says. “I love Chicago too, But my friend Illyana is very busy. I’m trying to get my other friends to stop treating her like a taxi.”

Rogue pedals by, on a bicycle slightly too small for her muscular frame. She’s looking blissful. The wind’s at her back, urging her on but mussing her hair. She’s been contemplating the sunset from the southern tip, and now she’s riding back to the cottage she and Remy took for the week, at the other tip, half a mile north. They’re the two most romantic spots on the island, the north and south tips, and all the other visitors have collectively agreed to stay away from them both: Rogue and Remy have dibs.

“Illyana! Can you get me to Dunedin?” Quentin hails her almost before Kitty sees him; she starts to say “Stop treating my friend—“ and realizes that with Quentin it’s no use. Quentin shakes sand off his skinny wet torso, out of his single lock of purple hair. “I have this buddy who’s doing an art installation piece and I really want to get there to help with the opening. He’s recreating some classic Marcel Duchamp. The one with the bicycle wheel on the pedestal. And the shovel and the urinal.”

“I am not your taxi,” Illyana says, coming up behind Kitty with a cooler on wheels and a mesh bag of sausages, bundles of carrots, unshucked ears of corn. A tiny blue thing with four wings and ten legs jumps out of the sack; steam rises from both of its heads.

Illyana flicks two fingers at the thing and whispers something in Low Daemonic. “Unwanted passenger from Limbo?” asks Sue, approaching behind her son.

“Close,” Illyana says. “That’s a refrigeration daemon. I told him to get back into the cooler or he might be stranded in this dimension, which would not suit him at all.”

“Does he keep the beer cold?” asks Xi’an.

“No,” Illyana says. “That’s a refrigeration spell. I don’t need to bring demons with me to do that. He’s just attracted to cold metal cans.” She says a few more words over the cooler before Quentin opens it up, takes a long can of Naragansett, pops it open, and walks away slowly, looking satisfied.

“I’m surprised he won’t fly away,” says Kitty, before turning back to Franklin and Nga and their sand castles.

“Sugah, he wouldn’t have a cold beer then,” says Rogue, who has stopped to say hello. She rarely sees the Storms.

But Sue has other questions. She also has some experience with unwanted intruders from other dimensions. “Do demons hitch rides frequently, Illyana? Or do you bring them with you on purpose?”

“Almost never on purpose now,” Illyana says, frowning. “I don’t need them.” She puts the cooler down and glares at Kitty, who gets it; Magik wants a beer for herself. Kitty phases one arm into the cooler and comes out with a cold Russian stout in a bottle, which turns solid again when she does. Another spell turns a pile of sand to a pint glass, so the stout can collect a head.

“Demons do get out, but I know how to put them back. Almost always.” Probably only Kitty and Xi’an can detect the Russian accent at this point. Xi’an hands a wrapped cheese sandwich to Nga.

Gabby zips by on a skateboard, leaving a trail of blood on the paved path. “All that blood better be yours!” shouts Laura, racing to keep up. “And no more stealing other mutants’ stuff!”

“Clone power!” Gabby shouts, then zips out of hearing range. Laura comes up to Xi’an, Sue, Kitty, Illyana and Rogue, and then sighs. 

“Kids these days, huh?” Rogue says, looking down the paved path at the vanishing figure of Gabby.

“At least it’s not Quentin,” Xi’an says. “I do not know you managed to live with Quentin.”

“He got better,” Kitty says, unconvincingly. “But he had no conception of ownership or privacy. Anything could wind up in his room, and he would call it a joke, or homework, or a test. He liked the idea of himself as a master thief. ‘Property is theft,’ you know. I wish he would just up and move to L.A. like he keeps talking about.”

“We need to talk about dinner,” Xi’an says. “Before Jean-Paul and Kyle come back.” She points up to the sky, where there are two men, one dark-skinned, one pale in a dark Speedo, flying in rapid circles, attached to a kite. 

Kitty, Xi’an, and Laura withdraw to one side of a hedge. Illyana, Rogue and Sue take the other, so that Sue can see all the kids.

“I was talking to Stephen,” Sue says, “about how to be, you know, a better mom for mutants, after we starting using Laura as a babysitter, and I realized that I wanted to ask him a question but I should really just ask you.”

“You can ask me anything,” Magik says. “I might not answer, but you can ask.” She’s hoping it won’t be about her love life. Or about the Elder Gods.

“Your stepping discs,” Sue says. “They go through Limbo. But… they don’t have to go through Limbo. Right? We could fix it, between your spells and Stephen’s and my thing with force dimensions and negative space, so that you could just teleport from one place on Earth to another.” Franklin and Amara together have fused an three-foot-high sandcastle into narrow, hard spires and turrets of shiny glass.

“You could just be a teleporter,” Sue says. “With no Hell dimension. So why don’t you?” 

“I have,” Illyana says, slowly, “a responsibility. I live here. But there I’m the”—and she adds a word that has no equivalent in any human language. “Very roughly, that means ‘ruler.’ But also ‘engineer.’ It’s very close to ‘babysitter.’ It means I’m in charge of what happens there now. Even if I delegate. Which I do. Or avoid it. Which I don’t.”

Sue nods. “I can’t.... I can’t entirely lose touch with a place that was my home for so long,” Illyana explains. “I have a responsibility. But I can’t… of course I’m never going to live there. My home is with the X-Men, on this Earth, now. And my vacation home, as of this summer, is here. But I come from—I am all the places that I have been.”

Rogue nods. She thinks maybe that’s why she’s kept her accent. She thinks of magnolias, and of humid nights, and of the last time she rode a bicycle. A girls’ model, with ribbons, and thick tires, for dirt roads. 

Illyana pauses to shake off her leather boots, step off the pavement, sink her toes into the fine, pale Class of ’64 Island sand. Sue’s still looking at her, concerned. “I cast wards, too,” Illyana adds. “If one of my demons follows me out of a portal unbidden, that demon cannot do harm to any living being. Nor can they destroy what the living have built.”

“They can steal things, though,” Sue says. “As long as they don’t break them.”

“That does happen, yes. Kitty?” Illyana calls. “Have you seen our steaks?” She looks around warily, as if about to unsheathe an unseen sword. Do demons steal steaks? Sue thinks. They must like their meat raw.

“Already on the grill,” Kitty says. “The seitan, too,” nodding to Xi’an, who doesn’t eat meat, although Nga eats nothing but hot dogs. Kids.

The sun has almost set over New York. Jean-Paul and Kyle descend, slowly, onto the beach. Kitty catches herself admiring Kyle’s figure. It’s the first time she’s looked at a guy that way since… you know. But he’s undeniably hot. As well as undeniably unavailable and uninterested.

“Kitty,” Illyana says.

“Sugah,” Rogue says. “I set you up with that sweet barbeque rub already, didn’t ah?” The more comfortable she feels, the more Southern she sounds.

“You did,” answers Kitty. “Dinner for all in half an hour. Can’t be later, because of the kids.”

“Just enough time to ride home and back,” Rogue exults. Then her face falls. Her bike’s gone.

“Gabby!” Laura shouts. She’s loud when she wants to be. Almost as loud as Logan.

Gabby skateboards up the road and towards the assembled adults. There’s a dead squirrel on one of her hand claws. “Squirrel!” she squeals.

“Wade taught you that one, didn’t he?” Laura sighs. “Gabby, did you take Anna Maria’s bicycle? Did Wade? Is Wade here?”

“I did NOT,” Gabby says, placing both of her hands on her hips, almost squashing the squirrel, still attached to one claw. “And I didn’t bring Wade this time.”

“Phooey,” Rogue says. “I loved that bike, I did. I only had it for, lahk, a week, and only on the island.” She looks like she feels even worse than she says she feels.

Xi’an nods. When you have very few things that remind you of your childhood, losing any of them feels terrible.

“Will you enjoy the cookout with the children, even without your bicycle?” Illyana asks. 

“Ah can,” Rogue says. “But…. sad.” She keeps her gloves on, takes off both her sandals, and buries her own toes deeply in sand.

Kyle approaches the group of women and waves to the kids. Rogue worries, sometimes, about whether he will ever feel at home here, among the X-Men. Does it matter, to him? thinks she gets how it works between them: Northstar puts Kyle first, and Kyle won’t ask him to give up his allies and friends, even though Kyle can never fully be one of them.

“Jean-Paul will be back in a couple of minutes,” Kyle says, shrugging. “Had to get shellfish from Maine, or possibly Prince Edward Island, I couldn’t tell. My husband talks fast.”

Kitty’s face falls. “You don’t eat shellfish. I forgot,” Xi’an says. 

Kitty smiles. “It’s not that,” Kitty says. “I stopped keeping kosher when I left Chicago. It’s just that this is Jean-Paul’s first time here, and I really hope he hasn’t forgotten the fundamental rule.”

“The fundamental rule?” Sue asks, before she remembers it. “Oh. I hope so too.” It’s everybody’s first year on Class of ’64 Island—Berto said he wanted to create a new tradition—but some of the mutants have been here longer than others.

“Are there telepaths here who can reach Northstar before he gets back?” Xi’an asks.

“Only Quentin, and he’s probably out stealing stuff—Oh, Rogue”—she’s genuinely upset now—“I didn’t mean—we’ll get your bike back somehow.” Kitty has to stop herself from saying “Promise,” because it wouldn’t be true. 

Kitty saw Rogue as an adult for years, even though they’re almost the same age, because Rogue had just been through so much: talk about someone who never got to be a kid. And here she finally had a bicycle, and even a bicycle horn, and a beach vacation with her sweetie, and somebody went and swiped the bike. Kitty would phase through every one of the thief’s electronic devices, if the thief were ever caught. 

But how to catch the thief? What if the thief were a demon? Would Illyana still be welcome on the island? Kitty remembered when her best friend’s presence made people feel unsafe. It wasn’t fair. Illyana had saved the world.

“Look!” Franklin says. There are two ships on the horizon: it’s the Navy, booming their cannons of green smoke at nothing. The one disadvantage to coming out here for vacation (and the one reason the island was up for sale): it’s close to naval proving grounds. “Ship wars,” Kitty says. “I used to think they were cool, but at this point I kind of hate ship wars.”

“Me too,” says Xi’an, squeezing Kitty’s hand.

Clouds of sand fly up and over the closed barbecue grill as Northstar came to a sudden stop. “I’m back!” he announces, speaking right to Kyle, as if nobody else were on the beach. For a guy known as standoffish, Kitty thinks, he sure does a lot to make Kyle feel included.

Xi’an and Northstar speak briefly in rapid French. “Non,” Jean-Paul exclaims. “Regrette. Non.” Then Jean-Paul thows a cold, wet burlap bag at Kitty, who catches it, and Jean-Paul turns back to his boyfriend; they saunter away. Then Northstar takes off, right up into the sky. Then he comes back.

The bag turns out to be full of oysters and ice. “No fundamental rule violation,” Kitty announces, and begins to lay the oysters out on a picnic table. Franklin and Nga show up investigate. “Hot dogs coming soon,” Xi’an says.

“Jean-Paul told me he didn’t see anything like a bicycle anywhere on the island,” Xi’an explains. “Illyana?”

“I cannot do anything until morning about stolen property,” Magik replies, “unless you want to take a small risk that everything on the island will be sucked into a pocket dimension of boiling oil. If you are OK with that risk, however, I can find the bicycle right away.”

“Ah, no thank you,” Rogue says, still downcast.

“I do not think it is a demon, in any case,” Illyana continues. “Demons do not ride bicycles, in general. Although they might eat them.”

“You’re not makin’ a girl feel better,” Rogue mumbles. Maybe she should just get off the island. Or stop trying to hang out with anybody except her main squeeze.

Gomi rolls in slowly from the cottage across the path, with a green lobster on a leash, Roberto and Amara behind him. “Almost everybody,” Kitty says. “Gomi, I don’t think you’ve met Susan from the Fantastic Four, and her older kid Franklin? Sue, Franklin, this is Gomi and that’s Bill the Lobster.” Sue nods. “Thus the fundamental rule.”

“We don’t eat lobsters ever!” Nga exclaims.

“That’s right,” Kitty says. “We don’t eat lobsters here, ever.” Gomi places Bill on the picnic table; both of them start to shuck and devour the oysters. Amara re-lights the grill.

Soon Roberto and Amara and Xi’an and Sue and Kitty and Illyana and Franklin and Nga and Gabby and Laura and Gomi and Bill and even Quentin are eating off paper plates full of corn and steak or seitan or hot dogs, watching the stars rise over the Atlantic, threatened by nothing, for now. But Rogue, though she gnaws on the corn, stands off to the side, watching the waves encroach on the smooth beach. Will things ever go right for her?

A trident flies out of the waves to land, prongs down, in the beach, no more than a yard from the mutants, their friends and their barbeque. Then a few pieces of scrap metal, and then a tall, brown-haired man in a wetsuit and scuba gear—truly advanced scuba gear, Kitty notices, the kind that almost looks like space gear—emerges from the swaths of foam, a long stick in one hand, and a kind of garment bag in the other. A garment bag big enough to hold a St. Bernard, or a tuxedo for the Hulk. A garment bag that also maintains a vacuum, or holds air.

The brown-hair man unhooks his mask, coughs briefly and looks around with bright red eyes. “Cher!” he says, and throws the enormous bag directly at Rogue. “I got you dis present for our first day at de beach.”

She unzips the bag, looks at the broken trident, looks at Gambit. “Oh!” she says. “You got my bike back!”

Kitty wonders whether Rogue even wants to know how the love of her life got her bike back, or whether she’d rather leave it a mystery. She’s also glad the ship wars are over, for now. Then Sue spoils the mystery by asking.

“Atlantis,” Remy says. “Cher, your bike was on de way to Atlantis before dis master tief stole it back for you right out from under de Atlantians’ fins an’ gills an’ noses. Even got back de bike before de tieves let any water in de gears. Atlantis got cheesed off dat Gambit’s friends got an island dat’s just for us, ‘cause Namor think dat everything adjacent to de ocean belong to Atlantis, and Atlantis belong to him. But dis bicycle? It belong to Rogue.”

Nga has been watching and listening. “But how did you find out the bicycle was under the ocean so fast?” she asks. “And how did you get it back? And where did you get that air seal package from?”

Gambit and Rogue say, together, “Tief gotta keep some secrets.”

They kiss.

They kiss some more.

“Please stop kissing,” Franklin says.

“Just for de sake of de children,” Gambit says. Rogue and Gambit sit down with the rest of the mutants, sucking up the last few oysters by starlight, as Laura and Gabby lead time-displaced Franklin to bed.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a sad Italian film that's very worth seeing (but sad). For Berto and the New Mutants' time at the beach cut short by Loki, see New Mutants Special Edition 1 (part of the Asgardian Wars). For Kitty and Franklin's shared history, see the Fantastic Four vs. X-Men mini-series. For Gomi and Bill the Lobster, see the Fallen Angels mini-series. Name of the island comes from perhaps the greatest X-Men fic in existence, "Class of '64": go read it!


End file.
